Gerry, dir. Gus Van Sant [2002] review

Gerry (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2002)

✭✭✭✭✭

Somewhere, in a remote, unnamed location marked only “Wilderness Trail”, two young men called Gerry, respectively, wander across a desert and get lost, unable to recover their way in the minimalist infinite of their landscape.

Not unlike the dazzling Elephant – the picture Van Sant would subsequently direct, winning the Palm d’Or at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival – Gerry is also a story about modern, Americana youth, the simple banalities of existing in a world full of safety nets, cushioned truths that state no matter what you do in life it will always be okay in the end. Each film appears to suggest that our engagements with mass media (video games, television) or toward everyday living (our privilege of water, food and shelter) are overly abused and underacknowledged. Nondescript intrigue inspires the brutal, Columbine-esque shooting at the heart of Elephant, whereas in Gerry – a film whose plot is borne by a comparable, numbed outlook – the motivation to do something different is abstracted even farther. “Well, how far is the thing?” one Gerry asks another, at the onset. “We're halfway there,” the other replies. If they are both thinking of the same, abstracted ‘thing’, or if they even know what it is, the film never let us in on it. It seems to request that our trust must lie in the journeying rather than any knowledge of what it is headed toward. Thomas Malory once expressed a similar view: ‘we shall now seek that which we shall not find’.

Gerry begins with two male characters (played by Casey Affleck and Matt Damon: also close friends in real life) driving along a blacktop road for a significant period; the former Gerry makes a turn, before parking the car in a dirty area of land. Intimate silence is dusted with the glacial, piano composition ‘Spielgel im spielgel’ [trans. ‘mirror[s] in the mirror’], by Avro Pärt, a pensive melody that gradually unfolds as it is being played (its structure based on an alternating rising and falling of the same crotchet triads). Together with the dramatic cinematography of Harris Savides, the soundscape appears to respond to, and influence, the images that fill the screen. Abandoning the trail to satisfy their own, personal quest – “let’s go this way, man. Everything’s gonna lead to the same place” – the two set off on a fresh route, strolling first, then sprinting, before finally (and this is what constitutes the majority of the film) attempting to retrace their steps to the vehicle. One mountain gives way to another, animal tracks to sand, and slowly the mission of redemption gives way to a fruitless defeat. I was reminded – whilst watching these desert wanderings – of the Tintin volume The Crab with the Golden Claws, where both Tintin and Captain Haddock, having crashed their aeroplane into the Sahara Desert, are obliged to trek a somewhat endless route in order to survive. It is hopeless, but we are able to laugh in our knowledge that they will (several pages later) eventually find help. Gerry, on the other hand, does not promise anything of the sort, even if mirages are glimpsed occasionally, the subject of their endlessness being the primary focus.

‘Gerry’ is the name given to each boy (or so we are to presume), as well as being a verb and adjective – “there were so many gerrys along the way” […] “we were going east […] which is a total gerry”, the term jargon for ‘fuck-up’ – leaving the two of them, ironically, somewhat anonymous. In so many ways, just as with Elephant, is the cited influence of video-game Tomb Raider present – or any interactive, action-adventure franchise. Van Sant seeks to imitate the first-person perspective(s) of tracking a figure from a distance; the film takes this idea further, illustrating their regenerative abilities, as evident when one of the two successfully jumps off a large rock without any injury to their health. To anyone who has ever played video games, moreover, Gerry registers a third similarity: the experience of seeing how far you can push a character in the digital map of their world, walking to the very limits of the map itself. Just as the temporality of the film traffics between day and night quicker than in real life, so do the men wander through it with a similar, non-human strength (until the end, of course) that seems lifted from the coding of any, digital avatar. Again: we are lulled into accepting this as reality, whilst conscious of it not being rational.

Inspirations are drawn, quite evidently, from the cinema of Hungarian director Béla Tarr, in particular from that of his magnus opus, Sátántangó, 1994. I remember a friend of mine (who owned it on DVD) making up a guideline for the best way to consume it; it went along the lines of: “I would only watch it on a rainy day, or if I were depressed […] and of course in one sitting.” Gerry does not require the same level of commitment, nor does it – despite being stylised to a European, arthouse aesthetic – carry the same, melancholic weight of the former. Tarr takes hours to drift across landscapes, one-shot takes that well exceed the standards of cinematic grammar, a congruent movement of real-time acting and real-time watching, almost as if welcoming one to look at the other, bemused by the same, interminable duration. Sátántangó is only loosely gestured at in the desert of Van Sant’s picture, its miserabilist strategy here substituted for movement, longing and the human experience. 

Gerry is a strange and outstanding feat of contemporary cinema. In essence, it is a film based on the concept of a universe that does not care for the lives it entertains, its camera watching the movements of two boys from afar, silent, and doing little to suggest any chance of survival. Van Sant summons a typically Beckettian image – as if taken from Waiting for Godot or Act Without Words, moving within absurdist scenery – but reinstates it within the mystic, unfading lines of an American landscape. It is tragedy and it is also comedy, but it tells a story of something far more poignant and untenable. “I’m leaving”, speaks one Gerry, lying flat on the desert floor. And so must the audience surrender themselves to the same, miraculous unknown.